An Accidental Publisher: Alan Wearne on Grand Parade Poets and Christopher Bantick [16.11.2011]

                                                                     I

Yes, I am an accidental publisher, one who is only seeing now that my new vocation has quite a few raison d’être I was unaware of pulsing behind its existence. Money, of course, helped as did my desire to try and ease frustrations with certain (though not all) aspects of contemporary Australian poetry. Witty whingeing can only go so far. If I have a loud enough poetry mouth (and I’m sure there are still plenty of folk who’ll never forgive my hatchet job on the late Dorothy Porter’s What a Piece of Work) we all know that cliché re: money-and-mouth, don’t we?

If one of the aims of Grand Parade Poets is to promote people who are not part of (or have chosen not to be part of) the mainstream poetry scene, then the initial catalysts for its conception were both tragic and comic– an untimely death on the one hand and a deservedly enthusiastic use of emails on the other. And, having been part of the poetry world since the magical year of – you guessed it! –’68, I hope I can readily appreciate the difficulties facing young (and not so young) poets seeking audiences for their work.

It was the death of Benjamin Frater (1979‐2007), one of the most highly talented poets of his generation and an heir to Blake, Ginsberg, the Beats, the Symbolists, the Russian Futurists, Artaud and Sydney’s South West Suburbs that prompted the beginnings of this press. It was agreed by myself and a number of Ben’s closest associates that a volume of his work just had to be published, not merely in his honour but for the benefit of Australian literature.

Although there are other publishers in Australia that might have taken the risks of publishing this, everyone involved felt that it was important to keep the editing, production, etc. ‘in the family’ as it were. During this period an old friend of mine, the highly individual yet very accessible Pete Spence, was emailing me and, doubtless many of his other friends, a near continual production line of witty, idiosyncratic excerpts from his ongoing opus which has lasted over four decades.

It was at about this time I inherited some money. I thought that putting an amount of that legacy towards a poetry publishing enterprise would be worth the emotional risk, if not the financial gain. Once Pete was on board, I started casting around for more poets in a proposed initial series.

The poets I have in mind range in age from the mid 20s through to early 70s. Their geographical locations range from the northern rivers of NSW to the southern suburbs of Perth. They are diverse Australian voices which deserve to be read, and will make a real contribution to contemporary Australian poetry. We will be dealing with, as Laurie Duggan commented on the Frater and Spence, “… books by poets who ought to be better known.”

                                                                     II

Almost four years to the day he died, Ben’s Selected Poems, 6am in the Universe, together with Pete’s Perrier Fever, was published. This dual project took over a year’s concentrated work, particularly from Rob Wilson (Ben’s editor), Tim Cahill (co-editor and writer of the afterword), Elle Dumuro (co-editor), Lisa Nicol (who is at work on a radio documentary on Ben), Anna Craney (who made the Ben DVD that goes with the book), Miriam Wells (Girl Friday), Chris Edwards (designer) and of course Pete Spence himself. In the last, say, three months, I wandered around, shrouded in my accidental vocation. I went to sleep with it, woke to it, talked constantly to folk about it. Whenever I was finished with them (or they with me), I started talking to myself. I might have read actual poetry, but I certainly never wrote any. I have never experienced anything quite like it.

                                                                     III

If there is another attitude of mine which can partner with my hopefully enthusiastic support for the Bens and Petes of this world, it is an attitude brought out on occasions when certain quasi-literary opinion piece writers (more often than not in the Murdoch Daily Broadsheet) present themselves as some kind of Andrew Bolt and/or Janet Albrechtson of the craft – wheeling out all those buzz phrases only the truly ignorant could think they would get away. It is then that the combative side to my nature urges me to continue in the publishing game.

‘Only greatness, not popular appeal, can restore poetry as the nation’s memory’ announced a headline around the time that I was deep at work preparing to launch the Ben and Pete double act. Whether journalist, teacher and author, Christopher Bantick, thought up this ridiculous phrase is debatable. Its cultural revolution ‘wall poster’ style seems to have a sub editor’s touch, but Bantick certainly supplied the data upon which this call to arms was based. Reading it, one has the fear that if the dice rolled an unfortunate way this critic might end up reviewing my books as a publisher. I don’t know if other countries have to suffer such reactionary diatribes in their mainstream literary media but, if Australia is the exception, then the editor in charge might have kept of this in mind to justify its publication:

‘Here’s something worth a good old Aussie stir, poetry. That weirdo corner of the arts. Now, what they require is yet another blood sport spat.’

I might have engineered a reply to Bantick and his backers but I was on auto-publisher at the time and could do nothing else.

If Bantick’s article requires, say, a Quarterly Essay style reply to fully bury the article, such as it is, well and good. I can only inform you how it affected your correspondent. Bantick’s initial target was a young Australian woman who had won some kind of International Poetry Slam event. He could not allow her any pleasurable five minutes of glory. Instead, he set up some sneering, huffing and puffing near-to-hate attack, doubtless thinking that, via attempted satire, he was on the side of ‘greatness’.

If the leading satiric poets of the language are Dryden, Pope and Byron, then their chief targets surely were not the slamsters of their time … slamsters who were probably down on the village green or in a nearby tavern regaling friends with witty enough doggerel on issues of the day. No, the targets were Shadwell, Cibber and Southey; writers with a decided ‘Only greatness, not popular appeal, can restore poetry as the nation’s memory’ mind set. That, plus poetasters who believed they were the men to do it. Meanwhile, down at the tavern, local bards were doubtlessly urging punters into some folk ballad sing-a-long, which one day might be taken up by dialect poets such as William Barnes … who in turn would lead to Thomas Hardy who would then lead onto W H Auden, etc. Although they have no pretentions to be Virgil or Dante (and isn’t that their charm?), poetry slams can be a pretty basic word sport. They’re an easy target if you’re after one.

Think of the little league at half time – mind you, when your team is down by ten goals at half time, wouldn’t you rather watch the little league? That one of their Aussie number won some International Prize is a pleasant enough novelty and that she would love poetry slams on Commercial Prime Time TV (an idea that Bantick abhorred), is an entertaining thought balloon.

But Bantick cannot allow this amusingly honest World Champion Poetry Slamster to bask in her few hours under the media sun. He compares this news-worthy (enough) item with the fact that Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s recent Order of Australia was never mentioned in the press! Now, I welcome this award given to Chris Wallace-Crabbe – his urbanity and wit being one of the resilient strengths of our verse and criticism for nearly sixty years (though I can think of other Order of Australia poets whom I believe did not deserve that gong!) But mention this in order to attack some successful poetry slamster? Why would one bother? Except, perhaps, that it just adds to the all-purpose huffing and puffing, demeaning for all concerned.

Mind you, one of the poems positively referenced by Bantick – in his all purposeful diatribe – was nothing like the work of Wallace-Crabbe or indeed of Wallace-Crabbe’s close colleague also mentioned in the article Peter Steele. This was Sylvia Plath’s incomparable ‘Daddy’.

‘Daddy’?

Surely if there was a 20th Century poem that might bedrock a young woman’s slamming career, it might well be that great hymn to patricide. You get the kind of confusion Bantick’s bile was giving forth?

When it comes to poetry, one of the great refuges of opinion piece writers surely must be a reference to ‘scansion’. When I see such a reference, alarm bells are surely ringing for I know that this writer has little else to say! Now, whether a poem that purports to be written in a regular metre can attend consistently to that metre (or if, in changing metre, it doesn’t look/sound clumsy) it is a bedrock of much great verse in our language. How pleased I was when I heard from Gerri Pleitez, a young poet I know with heaps of ‘attitude’and she had read Gray’s Elegy. And, yes, it somehow made sense (this kind of pleasure and attitude equalling that joy a few years ago when my former student, Alan Murphy, by then well into his 80s, wrote and recorded his first and probably only rap song). That is how it should be.

But ‘scanning’ has its limits. With those that harp on about it, or the lack thereof – remind me so much of those neo-conservatives who love to introduce the Magna Carta into their ravings. It even reminds me of those holocaust deniers who proclaim they aren’t anti-Semitic, they just want to establish … the truth (as if such referencing instantly grants them some kind of moral high ground)!

Bantick, in his column made reference to one poem that scans, My Country by Dorothea Mackellar – and boy does that scan – it does nothing else but scan itself to death. That this particular piece of clichéd-ridden, sub-Georgian doggerel can still be referred to in an article of comment about contemporary Australian Poetry must really show up a paucity of intellect and imagination. Do you think that were there to be an opinion piece in the New York Times on contemporary American poetry, that a mention of Ella Wheeler Wilcox or Edgar Guest would even be countenanced? If you don’t know these two look them up and consider it.

                                                                     IV

Is it any wonder one would now feel it was a duty to publish Benjamin Frater, Pete Spence and hopefully those others to come? I can say My Country made me do it.

                                                                     V

In the late 1990s, John Coventry, a businessman friend whom I have known since grade 2 (1955), gave me his card. On the back of that card was his company’s mission statement. Perhaps it was the poet in me who thought that this phrase I had never seen before was some kind of joke John had concocted, though one I didn’t quite get. I soon saw this term again and again, by now making me think that it was a businessman’s joke, one transcending any single CEO. Wrong again. I saw that mission statements were indeed universal, every direction I turned there they came hurtling towards me in all their corporate hyperactivity … whilst I wryly, sorely became aware that if there was a joke, it was on me: verse novelist, dramatic monologist, satirist, friend of John Forbes, Laurie Duggan, Gig Ryan, Pi O, Nigel Roberts, Rae Desmond Jones, poet sophisticates all.

Whose was the first mission statement? We’ll probably never know. Such is the way of the current world. I reckon we’ll soon be auditioning whose is to be the last. Until then, thirteen years after I received John’s card, I give you (ah such is the power of language) Grand Parade Poets Pty Ltd’s never to be repeated, don’t-tell-me-you’ve-guessed-it-already …

Mission Statement

Poetry for Grand Parade Poets is the imaginative use of language under pressure for the enjoyment of yourselves and others. We believe there are plenty of readers who don’t want Australian Literature, let alone its poetry, to be turned into a sideshow booth at some 365 days a year writer’s festival, or a dingy, cramped branch office of Cultural Studies. Poetry is too serious an occupation to be beholden to such ephemera, though with a wonderful perversity there is no section of the arts better suited to not taking itself seriously. Poetry must be elitist and democratic since it brings high-powered imaginative entertainment and intellectual pleasure to those willing enough to meet it at least part of the way. Grand Parade Poets wishes to publish poets of music, passion and intelligence. We trust you will enjoy the results.

Alan Wearne is publisher at Grand Parade Poets.

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